to us. And the Pharisaic community
passes by on the other side of the way, in fear of a falling brick.
Down come the walls of the home, as quickly as pickaxes can send them.
Down they crumble, piecemeal, into the foundations, and are carted
away. Soon other walls will be rising--red-brick 'residential' walls,
more in harmony with the Zeitgeist. None but I pays any heed to the
ruins. I am their only friend. Me they attract so irresistibly that I
haunt the door of the hoarding that encloses them, and am frequently
mistaken for the foreman.

A few summers ago, I was watching, with more than usual emotion, the
rasure of a great edifice at a corner of Hanover Square. There were two
reasons why this rasure especially affected me. I had known the edifice
so well, by sight, ever since I was a small boy, and I had always
admired it as a fine example of that kind of architecture which is the
most suitable to London's atmosphere. Though I must have passed it
thousands of times, I had never passed without an upward smile of
approval that gaunt and sombre facade, with its long straight windows,
its well-spaced columns, its long straight coping against the London
sky. My eyes deplored that these noble and familiar things must perish.
For sake of what they had sheltered, my heart deplored that they must
perish. The falling edifice had not been exactly a home. It had been
even more than that. It had been a refuge from many homes. It had been
a club.

Certainly it had not been a particularly distinguished club. Its
demolition could not have been stayed on the plea that Charles James
Fox had squandered his substance in its card-room, or that Lord
Melbourne had loved to doze on the bench in its hall. Nothing sublime
had happened in it. No sublime person had belonged to it. Persons
without the vaguest pretensions to sublimity had always, I believe,
found quick and easy entrance into it. It had been a large nondescript
affair. But (to adapt Byron) a club's a club tho' every one's in it.
The ceremony of election gives it a cachet which not even the smartest
hotel has. And then there is the note-paper, and there are the
newspapers, and the cigars at wholesale prices, and the
not-to-be-tipped waiters, and other blessings for mankind. If the
members of this club had but migrated to some other building, taking
their effects and their constitution with them, the ruin would have
been pathetic enough. But alas! the outward wreck was a symbol, a